


sugar and ice

by princedemeter



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Historical AU, don't ask me what the formatting of this is, god AU, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29645841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princedemeter/pseuds/princedemeter
Summary: “He is my son,” Philza says. “Mortal or not, I would see him grow strong.”Technoblade looks down on earth, at the tiny, angry bundle of cloth and pinking, wrinkled skin. This mortal child, he thinks, lungs filled with breath from the king of gods himself, will not grow strong.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Technoblade & Phil Watson, Wilbur Soot & Technoblade
Comments: 21
Kudos: 263





	sugar and ice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aenqa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aenqa/gifts).



> this is 4 aenqa .... i wrote u major character death because nothing says i care about u like major character death
> 
> CW: blood, gore, death, mention of rape

He is skinny and frail at birth, cold, his lips blue and his eyes wide as he chokes on air. Technoblade watches from far above as the mother pats his chest, tears in her eyes. She will lose her son. 

It happens to these mortal women over, and over, and over again. Children are born fast and die faster. The pain of childbirth is eclipsed by the pain of loss, and then, like animals, the women try again. Success is uncommon. Those that live to adulthood are hardy and tough. 

Technoblade only watches this woman because the dying child is his brother. 

Disinterest stirs in him, sluggish, and he turns to his father. Beside him, the king of the sky looks down upon the scene, one eyebrow raised. Filth, Technoblade thinks. They stink and smell of rot. They stick their feet in mud and wonder why they have fleas.

“He will die?” He does not mean to ask it as a question.

Philza turns away. “No.” 

Life-breath tastes of sugar and ice, and the boy on earth gasps, and the mother holds him to her chest. Her tears drop onto the face of her son, and he wails.

“He is my son,” Philza says. “Mortal or not, I would see him grow strong.”

Technoblade looks down on earth, at the tiny, angry bundle of cloth and pinking, wrinkled skin. This mortal child, he thinks, lungs filled with breath from the king of gods himself, will not grow strong.

Technoblade knows nothing of the passage of time. His years are short and stretched like putty. The only marked difference between the seasons is the Nether; Technoblade visits his mother there where she shrinks away from him and hisses, her eyes primal and blind. Philza destroyed her soul years ago, a fool too trusting in love. Mortals cannot gaze upon the true form of gods.

She becomes harder and harder to find as time scrambles towards its finale. Soon she will be dead. 

“Mother,” Technoblade says.

Her head whips to him, eyes white and unseeing.

“I am your son.” He pauses. “Do you remember me?”

She does not, but Technoblade asks this question whenever he visits. She interests him. She is stripped down to the barest of living and yet still she feeds and sleeps and cries when she is in pain.

“You are ugly,” he says to her. “You are dying and you are in agony. I would show you mercy, if he would let me.”

She hisses at him and backs up, gripping the knotted wood of the trees to guide her. He wonders if perhaps, deep down, she can hear him.

Technoblade spends time hidden in the mortal world after his visits with his mother, away from his father’s all-seeing eyes. He does not wish to speak to him. 

Morpheus, god of sleep, visits him from time to time, flitting through the trees above him. Technoblade does not enjoy his company, his mocking smile, his black eyes. He holds in his gnarled hands the dreams of every sleeping mortal. It makes him arrogant.

“Were you visiting your mother?” he asks, crawling along a branch above Technoblade. “I heard she’s getting worse.”

“You hear a lot of things,” Technoblade says mildly.

A dream, amorphous and pale, splatters on the ground. Technoblade looks up. Morpheus lounges against the trunk of a tree, his legs crossed and mouth curled in a smile. One by one, he plucks dreams from his pockets and tosses them aside, where they splatter and dissipate against the forest floor.

“It’s unfortunate, what mortals must endure,” Morpheus sighs. “I pity her.”

“She doesn’t need it.”

“Need what? My pity?” A laugh, rattling and wheezing, that sends a shiver down Technoblade’s spine. “Her blood is in you, _blood god._ If anything, _you_ need my pity.”

Technoblade holds back his snarl, but his voice still shakes. “I don’t need anything from you.”

Morpheus’s laugh hisses through the forest. “How about my advice, blood god? Stay away from mortals. You’re already halfway to corruption.”

It is perhaps days later, or maybe years, when he unwittingly meets his brother. The boy is tiny, toothpick bones and cotton flesh. Technoblade could crush him.

“Hello,” the child says, looking up, up, up. “I’m lost.”

The market is crowded today, thrumming with people, blood and disease and stink. The humans are not supposed to see him. They all turn their heads away. Their eyes pass over him as though he is blank space; Technoblade prefers it this way. “I… I don’t care,” he says, nonplussed. 

The boy pouts. “That’s unkind.”

Technoblade looks deeper in him, searching for any threads of magic in his blood to explain how the boy can see him. Instead of magic, he finds ichor. Instead of air in the boy’s lungs: sugar and ice. 

“You’re a demigod,” he says.

“My mummy says I’m the son of the king god Philza.” The child lifts his chin high. “How’d you know?”

“Smelled it on you,” Technoblade snorts. His brother, he thinks, remembering the short-lived moment of confusion. The life-breath. The baby’s blue lips. _I would see him grow strong._ He wonders if Philza is watching.

The pain in his mother’s eyes and the animalistic fear. _He did this._

“You did _not,”_ the boy says. “You can’t smell gods.”

Technoblade taps the side of his snout and lets his glamor drop. The boy’s eyes go wide. Technoblade wonders what temples the boy has seen his statues in. If he’s ever scraped his potatoes into the fire as an offering to the god of war, his brother.

“Gods can,” Technoblade says, and walks into heaven. 

She dies on a Wednesday. Technoblade does not mourn, and he does not grieve. 

He spends time in the mortal world. He sits cross-legged next to a monk doing his morning rituals, secluded away on a mountain. He dances in a ritual for a dead warrior. He moves among the crowd at market and guides people towards the knife vendor. He stands in his brother’s house and watches the mother knead bread. His brother is picking out an ugly tune on a little wooden lyre; the _plink, plink, plink_ of each note falls to the ground like fat raindrops.

The mother says something soft, and his brother laughs, and puts away the lyre, and helps her with dinner. Technoblade watches, and he does not mourn, and he does not grieve.

The next time he speaks to his brother, the boy is taller, but his bones are still toothpicks, and his flesh is still cotton.

“Hello,” Technoblade says.

The boy digs his shovel into the ground, leaning on it, fingertips smearing dirt on his chin. He stares at the earth and does not look up. “I knew you would come back.”

Technoblade does not speak.

“I _knew_ it,” the boy says, still looking away. “I told them – told them _all_ I had met Technoblade, god of blood and war, and none of them listened to me. They told me I was a fool. But I wasn’t. I’m not.”

“I would like to know your name, brother,” Technoblade says.

The boy looks over, his head turning slow, and his dark eyes make contact with Technoblade’s. “Wilbur,” he says. “Everyone calls me Will.”

Wilbur, Technoblade thinks. His brother, with Technoblade’s same red gold blood running through his veins. Wilbur.

“Hello, Will,” Technoblade says. 

“When you go,” Wilbur says, his voice quivering, “will you come back?”

The boy is young enough to believe in gods. “Yes,” Technoblade says. “I will come back.”

Technoblade is the god of blood, and the god of war, and the god of vengeance. A young lord asks him to kill the king that ravaged his sister. Technoblade gives him the weapons and tells him to do it himself. 

The king’s brother ascends to the throne and declares war on the neighboring country. Technoblade stands in the center of the battlefield and soaks up the blood that stains the bare feet of farmers. 

Wilbur is old enough to take a wife when Technoblade next visits. “You haven’t aged,” Wilbur says. “You look exactly the same.”

Wherever the god is in Wilbur, Technoblade does not see it. He tills the fields and plants his vegetables. He sells them at market and the carts wheeling by splatter his hands in mud and feces. He is the son of the king of divinity and he feeds, and sleeps, and cries when he is in pain. Technoblade can find no godliness in him.

“And you will die soon,” Technoblade says in response. “You’re mortal.”

Wilbur shrugs and twists the scythe in his hands. “Will you ever die, Technoblade?” he asks. “When the world ends in a snivelling whimper, will you go with it?”

A storm rolls across the valley. Technoblade says, “Is that a threat?”

Wilbur laughs and thumbs the edge of the scythe. “No,” he says. “No, no, I’m no fighter.” He looks towards the sky. “I don’t think that’s the gift Dad gave me.”

“He gave you life-breath,” Technoblade corrects.

Wilbur stills. “What?”

“When you were born.” Technoblade does not see the way Wilbur’s knuckles go white. He does not see the clench of his jaw. “You were dying. You were weak.” He looks up at the same sky, gray and pregnant with rain. “Our father gave you life-breath.”

Wilbur is very quiet.

“You… you knew?”

Technoblade frowns. “What?”

“You knew I existed and you never visited me?”

Technoblade looks at the mud, and his feet in the mud. “I am here.”

“I don’t care _where_ you are. You knew I existed, and you left my mother to birth me alone.”

“We see all – ”

“She _SUFFERED,”_ Wilbur thundered. His eyes are black and the clouds reflected in them swirl with an oncoming storm. “My mother was _alone!_ She prayed to your – to my father, every single day, begged him to give her the strength to give birth to me, and he never responded. He never came.”

It is raining, now. Wilbur’s curly hair flattens and plasters itself to his forehead. “He couldn’t have been _bothered_ to show up.”

“He saved your life!”

“I’m not talking about me,” Wilbur snarls. He looks at Technoblade with a sneer. “The gods are a lot of things, but I never thought they would be _selfish.”_

Technoblade only visits him once more before he dies. He stands at the edge of the field where Wilbur works and waits for him to see him.

“My wife is expecting,” Wilbur says, when he finally speaks to Technoblade. “Will the child be godly?”

“He will have divine blood,” Technoblade says. “Just as you and I do.”

Wilbur digs into the dirt with the heel of his foot. “We will name him Tommy,” he says. “Will you visit him?”

Wilbur is too old to believe in gods, and yet he still does.

“Yes,” Technoblade says. 

“I have a – a question,” Wilbur blurts out, hopeful and nervous.

“What is it?”

Wilbur does not meet Technoblade’s eyes. He is quiet, for a very long moment, before he finally speaks. “Legend says your mother was a mortal. Is it true?”

Technoblade grounds himself in the mortal world. The smell of the dirt, the sun on his neck, the breeze in his hair. He remembers – before everything – how the world felt in the palm of his hands. “She was.”

“Then why are you immortal and I am not?” Wilbur asks. “Why am I stuck with the life of pain, and hardship, and the only thing I know about the ending is that it is unknown?”

Technoblade sighs. He is more powerful than ever, and somehow, he no longer holds the world like he once could. “I don’t know.”

Wilbur throws his hands in the air. “ _You_ don’t know.” He turns away and rubs his nose. “Are we all truly so blind?”

Technoblade does not tell him this: once, he was mortal too.

Morpheus slits Wilbur’s throat in front of Technoblade as he struggles. The gold-threaded blood spills out all over the floor of the temple and Wilbur’s body slumps forward onto the marble, ugly and mangled and awkward.

It is Technoblade’s temple. To kill Wilbur on the altar makes him a sacrifice. 

“I told you,” Morpheus sings, low. “Caring for mortals is corruption.” 

Technoblade cannot take his eyes off of his brother. “I do not care for mortals.”

Morpheus nudges Wilbur’s body with his foot. “ _Now_ you don’t.” He passes by Technoblade but stops beside him, his face lit by the torches in the archway.

He claps Technoblade on the shoulder. “Just did you a favor, blood god.”

Technoblade moves before he thinks and grabs Morpheus by the wrist, digs his thumb in, nail piercing through the skin. Pure gold leaks from his veins and trickles down his arm. Morpheus is glee, teeth sharp, dripping with dreams that drip thick down his chin and neck.

“You did me no favors.”

“Ouch,” Morpheus says, shaking himself loose. “See you, then, _Technoblade.”_

Technoblade faces a blank wall. Does not want to look at Wilbur, but he must. He moves his feet, turns to the altar.

His brother is facedown in his own blood, curly hair dragging in it and matted with it. The brighness seeps into the cracks in the floor. When Technoblade turns him over with careful hands, the blood wells in Wilbur's unseeing eyes like tears and clumps in his eyelashes. 

He kneels in the blood and it stains his robes and his skin. It is warm, still. Wilbur’s life leaks from his body, and Technoblade looks inside him as he once did, when he first met the boy with the toothpick bones. The ichor, and slowly leaving Wilbur, the life-breath. 

Technoblade saves it. He will give it to Wilbur’s son. 

Technoblade emerges from the temple into the peaceful night, covered in his brother’s blood and holding his soul like a jewel. He imagines: this is the world in the palm of his hand.

Far away, towards the edge of the world, is a staircase, one that Technoblade has never felt the need to climb. He climbs it now and the midnight stars rise around him, the dome of the sky growing closer and closer. It tickles like lightning, and his hair stands on end. He cradles his hands close to his chest.

At the ceiling of the world, Technoblade reaches out and releases Wilbur’s fluttering soul into the night sky.

When he next looks up, years have gone by, and there lies on the eastern horizon a tiny, glittering constellation.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @princedemeter. twitter @princehestia


End file.
